Here's How I Turned My Junk Food Obsession Into A Successful Career

If you love the idea of trying crazy new snacks before the rest of America does, a position just opened up.

Marvin Nitta worries he's been Oreo-blacklisted. He doesn't know for sure — or that a blacklist like this even exists — but he can tell something's up. Ever since he shared a photo of Brownie Batter Oreos weeks before they were supposed to hit stores, Oreo's parent company Mondelez stopped sending him samples of the latest limited-edition flavors. He's basically being cookie-ghosted.

The company wouldn't comment on Nitta's dry spell (though it clarified that Oreo's always excited when there's buzz surrounding a new product), but either way, the lack of samples does make Nitta's job a little trickier. His 9-to-5 isn't like most people's; it isn't even a 9-to-5, actually. As the editor of The Impulsive Buy, a website dedicated to highlighting the best new junk food on grocery store shelves, he sets his own hours and follows his own rules. He's one of a handful of influencers who are redefining the term 'food blog,' often leaking products well before publicists' rollout schedules — and feeding the internet's ever-growing need for more, new, now.

In the grocery store world, finding a new Oreo is like uncovering Willy Wonka's golden ticket. "[They] are by far the most exciting products," Nitta said. As we know all too well at Delish, few foods get people riled up quite like those sandwich cookies. A post about the latest limited-edition treat can quickly skyrocket to the top of our most-read stories, and within a day, it'll usually start trending on Facebook and Twitter. Before long, taste test videos will pop up on YouTube, as intrepid vloggers do everything short of selling their right kidney on the Dark Web to get their hands on a pack.

It also inspires plenty of hoaxes. Yes, in the era of #fakenews, nothing is sacred — even your lunchbox treats. Several people have started Photoshopping flavors, either as a joke or to get a quick rush of traffic. Rather than constantly battle new flavor rumors, the brand sticks to its own announcement schedule. "To ensure that ALL OREO fans (including those who have started flavor rumors or leaked products in the past) receive the latest product news at the same time, we typically do not confirm new flavors too far in advance of their official release," a company spokesperson said. "This way, fans can actually find and purchase the OREO products they see or read about, whether it's in a story or on a social feed." Sometimes it mails out samples to social influencers and members of the media; sometimes it doesn't.

If anything, Nitta's sandwich-cookie dry spell only adds to the thrill of the hunt. Instead of being handed leads, he's got to search for them — and he's gotten really good at finding the goods without having an inside man.

There's A Mole In Your Snack, Sir.

Most of his leads don't come from people at all, actually. "If you know what websites to look at, you can learn about products before the public does," Nitta said. "For example, sometimes the Walmart website will list items before they're on shelves. That was the case with the new Keebler Lemon Creme Pie Fudge Stripes."

That skill's helped him build The Impulsive Buy from a hobby he did on the side while working in marketing and public relations, to a full-time job, overseeing a dozen reviewers from his home in Honolulu, Hawaii. It's a sentiment echoed by every blogger we interviewed: The truth is out there. It's just tangled in the interwebs, tucked away for only those who know how to find it.

Sometimes, though, the news comes directly to you. Chris Brugnola and Jaclyn Menendez stoked an internet frenzy earlier this year, when they reported on 10 unconfirmed Oreo flavors in the works for 2017 on their blog, Junk Banter. After getting rejected as reviewers for another blog, they launched their own site as a way to review their favorite new snacks, but focused on an unlikely source: Instagram. They posted photos of every new product they found, foregoing endless streams of hashtags in favor of full-blown reviews, often asking fans to voice their opinions. The opinions came flowing — and then came the leaks.

"When you engage people on social media you'd be surprised how much info comes your way unsolicited," Brugnola said. He also admits that he often gets leads from people who work for the company in some capacity, or from people who stock the shelves in stores.

You Can't Deny The Thrill Of The Hunt.

That's the interesting thing about packaged foods — while video games, movies, and books have a set release date and rarely appear even an hour before the assigned time, food hits stores whenever a supermarket or big box shop has the supplies in stock, and the shelf space to carry them. That's why your aunt in Omaha might find Cheesecake M&M's at Target weeks before they hit the store near you. In a sense, this makes the search more interesting to junk food obsessives — you never know where something new might pop up. And now that brands have been ratcheting up the number of limited-edition flavors they release a year, you've got a nonstop stream of content for these bloggers to build a business around.

He often gets leads from people who work for the company, or even from people who stock the shelves.

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But obviously the buzz works both ways. While a product leak or early review of a dish can drive a ton of traffic for bloggers, it can be an even bigger boon to brands — the ultimate snack-22. First Born, the company that makes Peeps, for example, takes that surprise-and-delight element to the extreme and works with Walmart to sell a Mystery Flavor marshmallow each year. Peeps benefits from the buzz of bloggers and Instagrammers trying to guess the flavor; Sam Walton's empire gains the foot traffic from people who know they can only get the chicks there.

These types of exclusives have become so regular for certain brands that bloggers have worked regular visits into their routines. Nitta, for example, makes a point to hit up Safeway, Target, Walmart, 7-Eleven, and Walgreens every other week, carefully wandering every aisle. If he's short on time, he'll head straight for the critical areas his readers love — and the spots most likely to feature new products: the cookie, candy, and ice cream sections, as well as any end-cap displays, which often feature seasonal items.

"I'm pretty much in at least one store every day, but I do most of my hunting on weekends," said Brugnola, who has a meticulously planned route that allows him to hit up every store near his house as he does his usual grocery shopping. "There's always that one damn thing getting buzz that takes forever to find. And I don't quit easily."

Walmart and Targets are must-visits around the holidays, when they tend to go HAM on exclusives (especially Oreo and M&Ms). He hits up Trader Joe's for quirky, unexpected foods, and out of every grocery store, Safeway is his go-to, since it tends to have a wider variety of snacks than most supermarkets.

Never Ignore The Drive Thru.

For many of these types of bloggers, the decision to start a website came down to two things: A raging sweet tooth and an overwhelming desire to try new things. For Quang Hong, it all came down to $50.

He was in law school, studying for the bar exam, when his cousin told him about an ad program that would pay you half a Benjamin to start a food blog. "I didn't want to do a cooking blog, but I eat a lot of fast food, so I thought, 'I could do that,'" he explained. In 2008, he launched Brand Eating, a site devoted to highlighting new foods from all kinds of brands, carving out a niche for covering fast food, often before anybody else.

For a while, he practiced law full-time while blogging on the side, but three years ago, once his blog started pulling in more than 1 million page views a month, he decided to take the leap and focus on the blog as his career. Hong's not making the kind of money he'd net as a lawyer — at first, it was "lower entry-level kind of money, like you'd make at your first job" — but, despite his initial motivation, he's not in it these days for the cash.

"Nowadays, people hop around from job to job because they're trying to find something they partially like doing," he said. "You don't like the task, but you like the purpose, or you don't like that, but you like the people. I can say I like my whole job. I like the freedom it affords me, and what I write about."

Hong's comments echo recent Harvard Business Review findings, which showed that millennials were far more interested in the personal growth and quality of life they could derive from a job than the income it could provide.

Even for those who haven't switched to blogging full-time — Junk Banter's two founders are a psychologist and an internal auditor for the Department of Defense — the shock of spotting something new is enough to keep them plugging away at the keyboard. And hitting up Walmart on the regular.

"We're probably the last people you'd expect to have this hobby," Brugnola said. "We're pretty normal people — we're just really passionate about our junk food."

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